Drive to Succeed

Happy Tuesday, Dear Readers.

I took my second course's final exam and passed, so that is one more thing off my plate, and a lovely new certificate to add to my resume. I am figuring out which courses to take next, so I am by no means done. I spent a large part of last week going through the research needed to figure out which staffing service I wanted to sign up with, along with applying to jobs on my own. I was able to narrow it down, and I signed up today. I was contacted by the staffing service and I have an appointment for an interview with them tomorrow morning.

I like jobs which are laid out logically, but have an element of unpredictability to them. The core of the job does not change, but the circumstances around the job can change depending on whom I interact with in order to do said job. To an extent, temporary assignments do this in spades, and depending on the type of temporary job you get, could be a stepping stone to a full-time, permanent position in which you fit.

This is how I found the last permanent job I had; I was a temp for the customer support department, and then the business was bought out by a different company, and at the end of my temp contract they hired me permanently, and after a couple years I was able to earn a promotion into a different department, where I stayed until I was laid off as the company went bankrupt.

I want to succeed and do a good job at whatever job I am handed. I want to be seen as somebody who, after almost 20 years in the workforce, is somebody people can depend upon both as a team player and an individual.

I hope that, whatever it is that drives you, Dear Readers, you are acknowledged for it. Now if you will excuse me, I have an interview to prepare for and clothes to pick out.

-A.M.W.

Achieving Goals Outside of Job Searching

Happy Tuesday, Readers! Hopefully everybody had a good weekend, and enjoyed watching some sportsball (or, in the event you didn't particularly care for the sportsball, you were entertained by the commercials and the half-time show).

I spent most of my weekend studying. Several blog posts ago, I said I was signing up for a couple grant writing courses online. One of them is instructor-led, and she releases two lessons every week, leaving time for people to do quizzes, assignments, and engage in the discussion board. The other is self-paced, and students can go as fast or slow as they need within reason. On Sunday, I took the final exam for the self-paced course, and I passed with a 97.2%. That course is now finished and I have a certificate of completion.

Acquiring a sense of accomplishment over something you have done, separate from your job search, can be very invigorating. I know I woke up yesterday looking forward to the research required to perform a good job search and creation of job application materials. I didn't even get downtrodden with the all-day snow that was happening outside my window, though it made checking the mail later a bit more exciting, especially with the sheet of ice that was under the snow.

Accomplishments can keep you going, and can help you keep a cheery disposition, even in the face of something most people do not like doing, like jury duty...which is something I may have to partake in this week. I find out on Thursday if I have to report for jury pool on Friday morning to the municipal court here in town, but I don't mind the thought of it as much as I did prior to my final exam. If it happens, it happens, and I go do my civic duty as part of the justice system.

I touched a bit in an earlier post about keywords that the end goal is acquiring a full-time job, and likened it to a game. The end goal, or win-state, of the game is always the most important part of the game, but when playing video games, sometimes it is the side quests that give you the bonuses you need in order to get to the end of the game and acquire the win-state. I view both the weekly posts of this blog, and the online courses, to be side quests that will help me acquire my win-state.

The game continues, and I'm unlocking achievements on the way.

-A.M.W.

The Importance Of Career Consultants

Following up from my last blog about keywords, I went to the Larimer County Economic and Workforce Development Center in Fort Collins. I had been able to contact a Career Consultant there, whom I had sat down with before, and had the good fortune that somebody had cancelled an appointment with her that I was more than happy to take on. 

My Consultant has been and continues to be friendly, helpful, patient and an example of what more people need when looking for a job. She was able to go over recent job listings I had applied to and helped me better identify keywords. She then went through the couple different resumes I have when I submit to a lot of different places for the same job title, and suggested style upgrades and where to place keywords. She even read through a cover letter that I had sent and showed me what was fine and what needed work. She did this all in one hour, and she was explaining the why and how of this the entire time so I fully understood why it mattered.

So now I have a better understanding of where I need to work on my resumes and cover letters, and I've been working on the upgrades. I have a better grasp of how to identify keywords (because it turned out I wasn't as good at that as I thought), and how to better integrate them into my resumes and cover letters, which I am also working on.

Would I have been able to look all this up online and figure it out myself? Maybe. Would I have been able to look all this up online and figure it out myself in one hour? Absolutely not.

Career Consultants are working with people every day from every walk of life to do one thing: help those people get better chance at getting employed where they want to be employed. They know the trends of resumes for certain career types, and know about resources that are at their fingertips but would take you an entire day of careful googling to find. They also can make suggestions that, in your stressed state of trying to find work, would not readily come to you.

If you have gone to Career Consultants before at you county office, make sure to thank them for all their hard work. If you haven't gone there, and you are looking for a career change, or just need some help with your resume, or your cover letter, or your interview tactics, I encourage you to make an appointment. They are there to help.

The Anxiety of Radio Silence and The Keyword Game

Being in the job market is stressful. There are companies to research, job listings to comb through, applications to fill out, people to contact for follow-ups or more information about the company, emails to set up interviews, phone interviews, in-person interviews, and thank you notes to fill out. Along with that, there are resumes for various positions in the career track of interest to tweak, cover letters to write, and practice for interviews which may or may not ever happen.

The worst is, after all that work, all that effort, to be met with radio silence. Apply with your best foot forward, with what you think is your strongest resume and cover letter, send the follow-up inquiry a couple days later, and yet...nothing. No response. The anxiety of what wasn’t good enough swiftly follows if you can’t shake it off and go to the next job.

I keep thinking of search engine optimization in relation to job application systems, fueled by keywords, which HR departments use to “help” them whittle down which resumes they actually look through to determine who gets an interview. As far as I understand it, have all the specific keywords HR has programmed in for that particular job, and the resume is sent to the department for consideration. Don’t have enough keywords, and your resume could be categorized as unfit for the position and HR doesn’t even see it.

I have filled out hundreds of job applications so far, and I’ve had over a dozen interviews, either in person or via phone. Some of these interviews went well (though not well enough to be hired), some interviews did not, but I was happy for the experience they gave me all the same. The anxiety I can’t shake, the thing that makes me wonder, late at night as I research yet another company, is this: if it wasn’t for the keyword system that HR departments have adopted, how many more interviews would I have been offered? Followed immediately by: if it wasn’t for this system, would I have gotten a job already?

Then the last, most pressing question: if that is the game HR managers are playing via keyword system, what is the best way to game that system to my advantage? After all, if I’m going to have to play by these rules, then I should figure out a way to consistently win and acquire an interview. The ultimate win state is to acquire an interview that lands me full-time employment.

Let the games begin.

-A.M.W.

Writing Means Researching

It is Memorial Day, and I would like to thank all the people in our armed forces for their service, past and present. I have several men who have served in the armed forces in my family, including my dad, and so I deeply respect those who are willing and able to join the fight to keep our country safe and free.

Now, since I have a free day, I decided to take some time and update the blog. First of all, I have successfully defended my thesis, which means I am going to get my Master of Science in Public Communications and Technology, and I'm officially done Summer Semester 2012!!! Huzzah!

Secondly, I have been super busy with Beet Street, writing for them and researching in order to do more articles. I've also had my responsibilities augmented so that I'm writing for Beet Street's AIR and their Streetmosphere programs. So far, I have done two blog posts for AIR, and as of this blog, one article for Streetmosphere, which is in the Coloradoan, though more will be published over the course of the coming month. I have a lot of things to look into prior to making blog posts, which is fun, and I'm discovering a lot about Colorado and the art scene here that I didn't know beforehand.

If you want to read the two blog posts I've done for Beet Street's AIR, you can go here:
http://airartsincubator.org/blog/p?=432
http://airartsincubator.org/blog/p?=438

If you want to read the article I've done for Beet Street's Streetmosphere, you can go here:
http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20120524/ENTERTAINMENT/305240002/Expect-experimentation-from-Matt-Smiley-Streetmosphere?nclick_check=1

I do have to say it's rather neat to have a published bit of work in a newspaper; I don't get writer's credit because I am but a lowly unpaid intern, but I do get to add it to my portfolio of writing samples. I am hoping that all of this writing will help get me a really good job by the end of the summer, if not earlier.

Cheers,
AMW